Big month for the game’s development as we continue stabilizing and polishing all systems to make the base as robust as possible and able to actually support the game’s content. Been polishing the game’s script too. Some tweaks here and there but nothing that wild. Mostly giving names to organizations and making affiliations easier to keep track of.

So funny thing right: I was writing some dialogue and all of a sudden I asked myself “what the fuck am I even looking at” and realized I was mega lost in this story that I myself wrote and even documented in a wiki so this doesn’t happen… and it still happened, so I pulled back a bit and made a list of the elements that actually matter and tweaked the first level to feature as few characters as possible. This helped greatly since I was able to wade through the noise and feature the parts that I considered relevant, and whatever addition will be there because I deemed it to be key for the game’s story or its fun/mood/vibe factor.

So not really a rework of anything, mostly tweaking how I present what I already have and when. Some things that happen in chapter one got either bumped to chapters 2, 3 and 4, or got cut, or turned into something else. It feels great to have a game so modular I can simply change when players get certain story bits to make things interesting.

It’s been fun to also adjust the draft of the script as I implement the text. Allows me to grab very rough dialogue and turn it into something special while retaining the intent. It’s an obvious product of proofreading and editing etc. but since I myself am looking at the dialogue on screen with visuals and music I can adjust it on the fly so it hits better. Hard to explain, but even then this isn’t the final pass. I reckon there’s still at least two more editing passes before I can consider it final text.

In raw numbers… I can’t really say right now but the game doesn’t actually have that much text. This was the result of two things: me wanting to have some limits and constraints so I don’t commit suicide working on this, and also because the mood of the game calls for something that lets player piece together the mystery. What my inexperienced ass didn’t know, however, was that even games with “minimalist” dialogue are still fucking hard to write because I have to be so careful about what information is relayed to players, how and when. It’s fucked up. But I admit it’s still less work than writing a whole moffugging VN or some shit. Or maybe not. I’ve written long-ish games and scripts before and I didn’t suffer as much so I don’t really know what I’m talking about. It is what it is.

We’ve been focusing a lot too on certain aspects of development that were taking precious time from us, like the way localization works with certain dynamic elements and the way the game handles things like transitions, camera shakes and UIs. A lot of the game’s instability was caused by not actually knowing Unity that well so we’ve been adjusting some scripts to make use of more built-in solutions that can stabilize the game during all sorts of scenarios. It’s another one of those things that we learn with time, though we’ve also learned to not trust Unity on certain things. It’s a matter of knowing where you can leverage its millions and millions of lines of code with certainty. For example, I trust Unity events and Cinemachine, but I try my best to not depend too much on fucking Timeline since it’s broken beyond repair which is a shame because I LOVE that tool. Makes me feel like Hideo Kojima going cinematic n’ shit.

This August will be a bit complicated. My mood has been amazing after a bit of a terrible event, and I plan to keep that up but I have to plan for a travel later this month and I don’t know if that’s gonna throw a wrench in what we have going on but it shouldn’t. It’s gonna be interesting to see whether or not we’ll keep fixing long-standing issues in the next 30 days or if I’ll start blocking out more chapters so they’re playable.

That should be it for now. Not much in the way of extras in this post either. Not that much changed visually aside from assets that got polished but you wouldn’t know since you haven’t seen the previous iterations. The game is so weirdly put together anyway you’ll probably be able to datamine the old models from the final game, lol, and make the comparisons yourself.

Here’s a screenie anyway.

And a drawing I made of the game’s main character, Reila.

I really love how this one turned out despite being a relatively quick thing. Maybe I’ll turn it into the game’s box art down the line.

Which reminds me I have to start some concept art for new enemies and other things, but that’s just another one of my gorillion tasks in this project. Inshallah, I’ll never have to stretch myself this thin ever again on another commercial game. I’m having mad fun but I ain’t getting any younger if you catch my drift.

Kiri out.